Has the word 'memory,'” he asks, “ a real application to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a figure of speech? "If I had thought," he continues later," that unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we all understand. "For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description and not a figurative" (p. 2). As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards alterative action " as "habit-breaking action. As regards the organism's being guided throughout its development to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that " Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication." "I should prefer to say," he adds, "the acme of organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within them. "I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness is actual memory.' I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to turn to Dr. Creighton's book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in my title. CHAPTER FIVE: STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE O F THE TWO POINTS REFERRED TO IN THE opening sentence of this book-I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic modification-the second is both the more important and the one which stands most in need of support. The substantial identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted; as regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I have made much way against the formidable array of writers on the neo-Darwinian side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far as possible to this subject only. Natural selection (meaning by these words the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than which I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last quarter of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification called in question. Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen1 and Professor Ray Lankester in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself; if they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they are met the better. Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;-whether luck or cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning. They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the situation-within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves-and persistent effort to turn it to account. They made this the soul of all development whether of mind or body. 1 Charles Darwin. Longmans, 1885. * Lectures at the London Institution, February 1886. And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as wells. The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by "Striking oil," and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No speculation, no commerce; nothing venture, nothing have," is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most dead-level organisms under the name of " sports "; but they would hold that even these occur most often and most happily to those that have persevered in well-doing for some generations. Unto the organism that hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that even "sports" prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way. The race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness. Festina, but festina lente perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification-is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as the amoeba. To repeat in other words. All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their failure to perceive that they are moulding themselves. "If a change is so great that they are seriously incommoded by its novelty, they are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly enough to grow to it, but they will make no difficulty about the miracle involved in accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three per cent.1 As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established, there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be accumulated in the course of generations-provided, of course, always, that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive habits and physical development of the organism in their collective capacity. Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been modified cumulatively in some one direction, until it has reached a development too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the organism taken collectively, then the organism holds itself excused from further effort, throws up the whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction of death. It is only on the relinquishing of further effort that this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change to change, altering and being altered-that is to say, either killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a ceaseless higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction. 1 See Professor Hering's Zur Lehre von der Beziehung zwischen Leib und Seele. Mittheilung über Fechner's psychophysisches Gesetz. Vienna, 1875. |